PolarLava::Blog

Okay, I've decided to start looking into Alan's request for the ability to post to PolarBlog via email.  This will probably take a bit of time as I still intend to continue with PolarLava CycleLog V2.2.0 (I'iwi) at the same time.  But I've often been intrigued by doing email posting even before Alan started desiring it.  Thus I've spent some time this morning exploring some options on accessing a POP3 account via PHP this morning.  Not sure whether I will be going that route or doing this with Perl.  Still need to think through the logistics  of it all.  I figured adding this feature will sort of ease me back into PolarBlog development.  Being a new/separate component it shouldn't muck up current code base which is always a good thing.  :)

Further proving the point that I'm not the only polar lava in the universe.  During a recent flyby of Titan by the Cassini space probe, scientist appear to have found a methane volcano (cryovolcano) on the surface.  See, I'm not the only one spewing out cold methane! ;)  

Well, my intent after releasing MyClient 3.0.0 was to go back to work on PolarBlog.  And although it is my intent to get back to it, I've decided to do some additional enhancements on my CycleLog project first.  I haven't had any urgent requests for changes to PolarBlog other than my own desires, so this appears that it won't be having a tremendous impact on the PolarBlog user community.  (Feel free to comment otherwise.)  A rough guess at this point, with the summer arriving and my increased work commitments says that PolarBlog development will likely not resume before September.  So with that said and in no particular order, here's a brain dump of things I'd like to do to PolarLava CycleLog V2.2.0 (I'iwi).

• Minor Name Change - Henceforth instead of just calling it "CycleLog", it will be known as "PolarLava CycleLog".  This is in anticipation that I may publically release this project, although it's unlikely to get packaged and documented during this upgrade cycle.  Even so, it's still available for the asking if you cycle and have the ability to hack PHP.
• Search Improvements - I have an immediate need to add the ability to seach for rides within a specific mileage range.  I also intend to add the ability to do ad hoc searches of my ride notes.  It probably won't happen in this release, but I'd also like to be able to search based on a bounded temperature range similar to my mileage search requirement.  Doing this is a little more involved because of the underlying table structure.
• Sleep Time - The addition of an "hours of sleep" field to the ride Personal Data section.
• Yearly Summary Page - Similar to the home page "Year-To-Date" display, I'd like to create a page that displays this same information, but on a year by year basis.
• Security Upgrades - Currently there a a few potential security issues I need to clean up.  Nothing catastrophic, just some concerns I have with the way certain things were coded previously.  Call it a learning process.
• Bike Page - All of the ride data that is displayed is associated with different bikes.  I'd like to add a page to display information about each bike along with a picture.
• Records Page - This new page will list some extremes: longest ride distance, longest/shortest ride by time, fastest average speed ride, maximum speed, extremes of weather, etc.  This one is sort of rolling around in my head so I don't know exactly what all will be contained in this page.
• Summary Update - The existing summary data has pretty much what I want in it I believe, but I'd like to make some of the elements clickable to the rides they relate too.
• Bike Maintenance - In addition to the Bike Page, I'd like to add a maintenance record component for each bike.  I would guess this has less than a 20% chance of being implemented in this release as it is a fairly significant undertaking.  Most likely to slide to V2.3.0
• Miscellaneous Bug Fixes - As always there a handful of small bugs that I also need to fix!.
• Calendar View - I forgot this one the other day…I'm looking into adding a weekly and monthly calendar view that will show basic ride info for the days that I've ridden as well as some sort of weekly and monthly totals.  This component would also the ability to view other weeks/months besides the current one.

I've released a minor update to MyClient to correct a typo in the config.php.dist file and also add some documentation updated.  If you are already running V3.0.0 successfully there is no need for you to upgrade to this version.

So I'm about a quarter of my way into my ride this morning when I turned onto Bear Ridge Road and began a small climb.  As I sat down and looked up, there he was…somebody on a mountain bike swinging off my side of the road to get out of my way.  As I've mentioned previously I often see a variety of fauna in the morning, including the occasional humanoid.  But today was the first time I've been flagged down for help.

As I passed this guy, he yells something at me.  I looked back and asked "What?".  His reply was "I need help".  Alright, so it's about 5am, still fairly dark and somebody weaving down the road towards you is asking for help…hmmm.  Initial thought: "I hope he's not covered in blood from killing somebody!".  So I pull over, stop and wait for him to get closer.  As he's coming towards me he tells me he's lost and is trying to get to North Tonawanda.  At this point I can see he's an obviously drunk young man who was a bit panicked.  So now I'm a bit amused at his predicament and give him the directions he need…several times being his comprehension was not real good after an obviously long night. I'm assuming he's alright as I sent him down to my return route and I didn't run into him again.  Ah, to be young and foolish again!